Abstract. The choice of natural image prior decides the quality of restored image. Recently successful algorithms exploit heavy-tailed gradient distribution as image prior to restore latent image with piecewise smooth regions. However, these prior assumed also remove the mid-frequency component such as textural details regions while they preserve sharp edges. That because gradient profile in fractal-like texture do not have sparse characteristic. To restore textural features of expected latent image, in this paper, we introduce fractional-order gradient as image prior which is more appropriate to describe characteristic of image textures. From details comparison of our experiments, the textual details are more clear and visual quality is improved. Key words: image motion restoration, fractional order, total variation, textural detail.